If you think that the benefits of automated marketing campaigns begin and end with email-based efforts, you're only paying attention to one small part of a much larger (and more important) story. In truth, there are a wide variety of different ways that you can use automated marketing to empower and invigorate the entirety of your marketing campaigns - you just need to keep a few key things in mind.

What Is Automated Marketing?

At its core, the term automated marketing simply refers to a type of software that allows marketers to automate certain repetitive-yet-important tasks. Sending out countless emails to recipients that all say the same thing, posting articles to social media channels, collecting leads from website forms - these are all essential, yet also take up a great deal of time. With the right marketing automation solution, these repetitive tasks can happen instantly - giving you an opportunity to reach out to members of your target audience but also freeing up your valuable time to focus on other tasks that require a bit more precision.

Harnessing the Power of Automated Marketing

One of the best ways that you can use automated marketing actually involves creating a much more personal experience for your audience - something that has proven to be quite important in the modern era. When asked to prioritize one element of their campaigns that will be the most important to the future of marketing, for example, 1/3rd of all professionals who responded to a survey said that "personalization" was their clear answer.

The great thing is that this doesn't even necessarily have to be complicated - look at the way Amazon uses personalized product recommendations as a prime example. Using the data that you're already collecting from your users (what they like, what they don't like, what products they browse, which items they buy, etc.) you can use automated marketing to recommend future items for purchase that they are more likely to be interested in.

Another way that automated marketing can be used to great effect involves not only capturing contact information, but instantly associating that contact information with records that already exist in your CRM system. If a member of your audience fills out a form on a landing page to take advantage of an offer, for example, you shouldn't need to manually record the responses of that form and match them up with the existing entry in your system. Marketing automation allows for this to happen in real-time, making sure that you always have the most accurate and actionable data from which to pull from moving forward.

Finally, one of the true strengths of automated marketing has less to do with how it helps you attract new customers and more with how it helps you retain, reward and empower existing ones. Using marketing automation, you can easily segment your contact lists to highlight your most loyal (read: valuable) customers. You can then develop automated campaigns that instantly send them targeted "Thank you" emails or even timely promotional offers after they reach certain activity milestones.

Did a particularly valuable customer just make another larger purchase for the third time this month? Don't worry about noticing this on your own - marketing automation can recognize it and send out a "10% off a future order" coupon without any intervention on your behalf. When you consider that it is always more expensive to attract a new customer than it is to retain an existing one, this is one technique that will quickly prove to be very valuable indeed.

Automated marketing is one of the most powerful tools that we have available to us in the modern era - but those benefits don't stop with automated "Welcome" emails. In truth, there are a wide range of different ways that you can use automated marketing tactics across the entirety of your efforts - you just have to keep an open mind and know where to look.